There's been a lot of recent focus on applications for aerial robots, and one of the areas with the most potential is indoors. The thing about indoors is that by definition you have to go through doors to get there, and once you're inside, there are all kinds of things that are horribly dangerous to aerial robots, like more doors, walls, windows, people, furniture, hanging plants, lampshades, and other aerial robots, inevitably followed by still more doors. One solution is to make your robots super small, so that they can fit through small openings without running into something fragile and expensive, but then you're stuck with small robots that can't do a whole heck of a lot. Another solution is to put your robots in protective cages, but then you're stuck with robots that can't as easily interact with their environment, even if they want to. Ideally, you'd want a robot that doesn't need that level of protection, that's somehow large and powerful but also small and nimble at the same time.

Huntington Beach's Building Division had 12 inspectors before the number was reduced to nine in 2008. According to a staff report, the division decided to contract for inspectors instead of hiring, based on the economy and the volume of work since 2010.

In this scenario, neighbours have been complaining that something smelly is coming from a nearby house. You've been called to the scene. This is what you'd hear if you were on one of the eight military and civilian bomb squad teams competing in the Robot Rodeo last week, an annual event hosted by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Observation planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a challenging task as it requires planning trajectories over a large continuous space and with motion models that can not be directly encoded into current planners. Furthermore, realistic problems often require complex objective functions that complicate problem decomposition. In this paper, we propose a local search approach to plan the trajectories of a fleet of UAVs on an observation mission. The strength of the approach lies in its loose coupling with domain specific requirements such as the UAV model or the objective function that are both used as black boxes. Furthermore, the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) procedure considered facilitates the adaptation of the algorithm to specific requirements through the addition of new neighborhoods. We demonstrate the feasibility and convenience of the method on a large joint observation task in which a fleet of fixed-wing UAVs maps wildfires over areas of a hundred square kilometers. The approach allows generating plans over tens of minutes for a handful of UAVs in matter of seconds, even when considering very short primitive maneuvers.

Amazon has increasingly been moving towards automatizing its supply chain, and new publicly released patents show a strange drone with airbags and claws. The patent for the'Collaborative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle For an Inventory System' was filed nearly three years ago, but just became part of the public domain. The bizarre machine is an unmanned vehicle with a'buoyant airbag' a'retention feature,' 'drive unit,' and'an onboard control module'. A patent filed nearly three years ago by Amazon titled'Collaborative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle For an Inventory System' was released publicly today The retention feature is essentially a large claw, and the potential drone would have propellers for lift and directional movement. The patent application says the unusual drone would be used in its warehouses for hard-to-reach places.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. On March 6, 2016, a small drone belonging to the open-source software company Drone Employee lifted into the Russian sky, traveling across an open field of white snow. Drone flight is relatively unremarkable today, but this particular drone wasn't controlled by anyone. Brought to life by a predetermined agreement, or "smart contract," running on the Ethereum blockchain, the drone's engines powered on and it lifted itself into the air, taking a flight path dictated--only and exclusively--by code. The smart contract controlled the drone's trajectory, without the need for a middleman with a remote to manage the device.

The wife of a missing man who was located by a police drone up to his armpits in mud said it was "a miracle" he was found alive. A major search was launched for Peter Pugh, 75, from Brancaster, Norfolk, after he disappeared following a beach walk on Saturday at 17:10 BST. It was only when the drone was sent up that Mr Pugh was spotted in a muddy creek at Titchwell Marshes on Sunday. Police said the technology was key to their rescue operation. Mr Pugh's wife Felicity said her husband, who is still in hospital in King's Lynn with hypothermia, was "slightly bemused" by what had happened.

The DXC Technology 600 was held this Saturday night under the lights of the Texas Motor Speedway. Scott Dixon took the checkered flag even though about 3,000 local DXC employees, clients, family, and friends were cheering for the DXC-sponsored car, driven by Simon Pagenaud, who finished 2nd. But this race had a lot more to offer than just car racing. As the title sponsor, DXC Technology had the opportunity to showcase some interesting technology at the event. DXC Labs director Sam Johnston brought some examples of the innovative technology DXC is using to develop new solutions.

The world has been producing plastic since the 1950s, with extremely rapid growth in the amount of waste generated from the 1980s onwards. And yet it was not until the 2010s that governments and other international bodies really began to address the problem of plastic pollution. A recent UN report shows a huge spike in laws to limit single-use plastics in 2014, with very limited regulations before this.

An Ohio sheriff's office says it used a specific tool as part of its efforts to track down an ATV: a drone. An Ohio sheriff's office says it used a specific tool as part of its efforts to track down a missing ATV on Sunday: a drone. "Patrol responded to a report of a stolen ATV this morning," the Franklin County Sheriff's Office explained in a Faceook post. "The owner stated that his son's new ATV was taken." Deputies said they used a drone to survey the surrounding area, following tire tracks left behind that led officers to an abandoned house.